Re: Commit dropped when swapping commits with rebase -i -p

[Phillip Wood <phillip.wood@talktalk.net>]

On 16/09/17 14:45, Sebastian Schuberth wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 12:41 PM, Andreas Heiduk <asheiduk@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Therefore I would avoid "definitive wording" like "will drop" and use
>> vague wording along "there are various dragons out there" like this:
>>
>>      The todo list presented by `--preserve-merges --interactive` does
>>      not represent the topology of the revision graph.  Editing
> 
> I tried to avoid this introducing sentence from the original wording
> as it reads like from a scientific research paper instead of from a
> user's manual.
> 
>>      commits and rewording their commit messages should work fine.
>>      But reordering, combining or dropping commits of a complex topology
> 
> There is no need for complex topology. If you reorder the two most
> recent commits in a linear history, one gets dropped.
> 
>>      can produce unexpected and useless results like missing commits,
>>      wrong merges, merges combining two unrelated histories and
>>      similar things.
> 
> "can produce" is much too soft, IMO. Reordering commits goes wrong,
> period. Like wise "unexpected and useless results" is inappropriate.
> The results are wrong in case of reordering, and wrong results are of
> course unexpected and useless.

I agree that the wording needs to be explicit that bad things will 
happen. It should spell out that if commits or reordered, or the fixup 
or squash commands are used then commits will be dropped and if commits 
are deleted from the list or the drop command is used other commits 
other than the intended ones will be dropped as well.